ENERGY GUEST BLOG -- WILLIAM M. BOWEN OF CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

Energy efficiency is not necessarily everything it's chalked up to be

Blog Entry: September 04, 2012 4:30 AM | Author: WILLIAM M. BOWEN

William M. Bowen is professor of public administration and urban studies at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. He's also associate editor of the International Journal of Energy Technology and Policy.

In much of what I read, energy efficiency gets touted as a component of sustainable energy practices, a way to curb greenhouse gasses, a font of energy savings, a source of energy security, a way to bridge gaps in energy production and consumption, or otherwise a panacea for all problems that renewable energy technologies cannot reach.

I frankly think people oversell it.

In the abstract, energy efficiency is hard to argue with. The concept of energy efficiency is that the energy efficiency of any production, transmission or utilization process is increased if either usable energy output from the process remains constant while amounts of energy input resources decrease or, alternatively, usable energy output increases while energy input resources remain constant. What could ever possibly be wrong with this?

The counter-intuitive answer is that in reality an increase in the efficiency of energy conversion in any production, transmission, or utilization process may lead to an increase (not a decrease) in total energy consumed.

Here is more-or-less how this can happen: New innovations and technologies improve the conversion of an energy resource input to a useable energy output from the process. This improvement drives down the relative cost of the useable energy output, thereby increasing the levels at which it is consumed.

This increase in consumption, in turn, increases demand for the energy input resource. If and when demand for the energy input resource increases to a level that exceeds the rate of energy savings enabled by the improvements in conversion, the net consumption of the particular energy input resource used in the process increases rather than decreases.

This is known as Jevons' paradox. In 1865 Stanley Jevons wrote a book called "The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines." In it, Jevons hypothesized that increases in the efficiency of the conversion of coal to usable energy might actually increase overall demand for British coal. Technological innovations that increased the efficiency with which coal inputs were converted to usable energy outputs, such as Watt's steam engine, could drive the price of coal down relative to the price of the other factors of production, such as labor, and this could broaden its usage and result in a net increase in the demand for it.

Today, Vinola Vincent-Munyon, one of the remarkable students in Cleveland State University's Ph.D. Program in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, is researching Jevon's paradox for her doctoral dissertation. Jevon's paradox would indicate that all else equal the technological advancements which enable improved automobile fuel efficiency will lead to a net increase in the amount of gasoline consumed. Ms. Vincent-Munyon has a large data set that provides the characteristics of individuals' automobiles, and their usage, and she is statistically analyzing it to determine whether individuals tend to overcompensate for improved automobile fuel efficiency by driving disproportionately more miles, thereby driving up demand for gasoline.

If Ms. Vincent Munyon's findings confirm Jevon's paradox, it may among other things be time to think seriously about whether we as a society want to increase our Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards.

Energy efficiency is undoubtedly a good thing, but it is not equivalent to decreased consumption. It is not a panacea for energy problems; nor it is necessarily, a way to reduce total energy consumed. It is almost certainly no substitute for practices and public policies that promote energy conservation.

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